#45 Enjoy the Madrid skyline from the cable cars

One of my favorite things to do in Madrid is ride the teleférico, or cable cars in the Casa de Campo park. I especially like to take the cable cars from the entrance in the Argüelles neighborhood at the edge of the park, and then once I get to the other end in Casa de Campo, walk through the park until I get to the lago (lake) where there is a metro stop (or on occasion I continue into the city on foot from there). The park is a great place to walk around (during the day! don't go at night).

View of the palace, cathedral, and Principe Pio station

Sierra de Madrid

The cable cars give you great views on one side of the mountains up north of Madrid, and on the other side, of the royal palace, cathedral, and really all of the western edge of the city. It's definitely a great place to go on a day with good weather.

#30 Step on Kilometer 0

You may or may not remember how a while ago I set out to complete the list of 101 things to do in Madrid. Yeah, about that...

Actually - and I may have said this before - I've already done or seen a lot of the things on the list (some things several times), and I just never photographed it or otherwise documented it. So I've been a bit slow in redoing them. And in doing some of the new things...

But I finally got a picture of myself with this one (actually over the summer, as you can see by the fact that I'm wearing shorts in the picture), the stone marker for kilometer zero in the Plaza del Sol, which I've for sure walked by countless times.

Kilometer zero is the central point of the road network in Spain. (Not to be confused with the central geographic point on the Iberian Peninsula, which is at Cerro de los Angeles, several kilometers south of Madrid.) It's really not all that special...but I suppose that since Sol is basically the unofficial center of Madrid, it's important to have been there. (Although I think it's impossible to visit Madrid or to live here without ever passing through it.)

So, not super exciting, but number 30 is done!

The francesinha: Portuguese heart attack on a plate

Back at the beginning of June, Emilio and I decided to get away from Madrid for the weekend, and we chose Porto as our destination. Located in northern Portugal, Porto is so charming and laid back that you'd never guess that it's Portugal second largest city. It's particularly famous for its port wine - you can visit several bodegas around the city.

The famous Dom Luis Bridge over the River Douro

Porto is also famous for the francesinha, a heavenly creation that will unfortunately probably take a couple of years off your life. But it's ok; it's worth it. This typical sandwich of Porto is sort of their take on a croque-monsieur except, well, more artery-clogging (and way more delicious). It's made with several types of meat (typically different types of Portuguese hams, pork, and sausages) between two pieces of bread that are then covered with melted cheese and lastly, a tomato-beer sauce. Think that's it? That it can't get more unhealthy?

Believe me, the picture does it no justice.

Wrong. Served alongside it, drenched in the same tomato-beer sauce, are French fries. Down it with a Super Bock (one of the country's most popular beers, produced near Porto), and you're likely not to want to move for the rest of the day.

Back in Massachusetts

As my 2+ month sojourn back in Massachusetts this summer is starting to come to an end, it's got me thinking yet again about the differences between living and working in Spain and here. Both Madrid and Boston have their advantages and disadvantages, and obviously my personal experiences can't speak for everyone else's.

However, here are some of the differences that stand out to me most at the moment:

God bless America

Customer service that you can actually consider a service to the customer.
This probably isn't a surprise. In fact, I've probably ranted about Spain's absolute lack of customer service in the past. It's a refreshing change to be back in a country where if you go out to a restaurant, the waiter/waitress is much, much more likely to actually care about getting you what you ordered, and you don't have to wait half an hour for them to bring you the check. Or, for example, I had a problem with an Amazon order, so I sent an (albeit slightly angry) email and got an extremely helpful and apologetic response within minutes. What a difference from, oh let's say Movistar, who, aside from not even having toll-free numbers, makes you wait half an hour just to speak with them and then doesn't even help you at all (and that's if they don't hang up on you in the process first).

Government employees who don't have a stick up their you-know-what.
Definitely not all government employees are pleasant and/or enjoy their job, but 1) they do much more work than the funcionarios in Spain and 2) they are much more polite. When gathering documents for my visa, I had to contact the Secretary of State office with a question, and not only did I get a real live person on the phone, but when they weren't able to answer my question, they forwarded me to someone who could, and when I got this person's voicemail I left a message, thinking I probably should have just called back later - but nope! She actually called me back. Later on, visiting the office in person, the security guards were friendly and polite. I suppose it's not fair to compare this with, say, the immigration office at Aluche in Madrid, but the difference is still like night and day.

Tap water! Free! Everywhere!
There's nothing like going to a restaurant and having a glass of ice water placed down in front of you before you've even had a chance to order it. As opposed to Spain, where they grumble at you if you even request a glass of tap water and then you're lucky if they don't try to charge you for it.

Oh, the places you'll go!
...in August. That's right, here in the good old US of A people actually work in August. Which means places are actually open. On a regular basis. No closing three hours for siesta (ever). Oh, and the banks are open past 2 pm. Some til 7! Many on Saturdays! Most government offices til 5! Grocery stores on Sundays past 2 pm! Oh, the places you'll go, indeed.

España, te quiero

Your meal at a restaurant that says it's 15 euros is actually 15 euros.
Tax included, and tipping absolutely not necessary (though most likely not deserved). It's always rough coming back to Massachusetts and getting back into the habit of expecting to pay (sometimes significantly) more than the price on the menu. Or in a store, more than the price on the shelf tag. Always including tax already rolled into the price is something I think Spain (or the EU, actually) does right.

Leavin' on a jet plane.
Long gone are the days when you can get dirt cheap plane tickets for say, 15 euros (at least leaving Madrid). Estamos en crisis. Nevertheless, there are still roughly 50 countries all packed into a continent only a fraction of the size of the US. And plane tickets, though perhaps not as cheap as a couple of years ago, are still generally vastly cheaper than short haul flights in the US. While I would love to start venturing through other continents, having the opportunity to visit so many countries in Europe so easily is one of the reasons I love living in Spain.

A metro that takes you from one part of the city to another in a shorter time than you can walk the distance.
Oh, that's what the metro is for, you say? I guess this is specific to Madrid and Boston, but even though Madrid's metro system may quickly be going to shit, this is at least decades behind Boston's tragic excuse for a public transportation system. I was roughly 20 minutes late to my visa appointment in Boston thanks to the god-awful Green Line train, for which I not only had to wait 15 minutes, but also spent way to long sitting on as it chugged at a likely two-miles-per-hour pace from one station to the next. I would expect this perhaps at 10 pm, but nope; all this took place smack dab in the middle of the morning. (Might I add that particularly for the green line, this is not unusual.)

Relaxing summer afternoons/evenings/nights on the terraces of restaurants everywhere.
I'm not usually one to hold back from criticizing the overly laid-back lifestyle of most of Spain, but I do actually think it has its benefits. While I know this is a huge generalization, from my perspective, the Spanish tend to be a more relaxed and happier people who highly value socialization with friends and family. This isn't to say we Americans don't - but if you compare the amount of people that sit outside at restaurants and bars during the good-weather seasons with (for example) the northeast of the US, Spain wins. I love (to an extent) this atmosphere and this mindset that relaxation and socialization are important, and that your job isn't everything.

Of course, the list of things that I like coming home to in the US includes seeing friends and family that I haven't seen for months, if not years. But I figured that's a given :)

Zadar, Croatia: a beautiful disappointment

As you  may or may not know, last Semana Santa I spent in Slovenia and Croatia. Both countries are really beautiful, and surprisingly (or maybe not), quite different despite their geographic locations and histories*. Croatia has some of the most beautiful coastline I've ever seen (which perhaps isn't saying much), and also some of the most delicious food. Of course, as we were there at the end of March, tourist season hadn't quite started yet, and this was good and bad - good because places were much less crowded than I would imagine they are in the summer, and bad because some things that we really wanted to see weren't open during the winter.

Driving along the coast between the cities of Zadar and Trogir.

Zadar in particular was a city that we really loved - it's small but compact, with lots of churches, ruins, museums, and little pedestrian streets. It's on the coast in north of the Dalmatia region so it has great views of the Adriatic Sea.

Zadar's Sea Organ (at high tide)

And yet, despite Zadar's charm and beauty, it was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the trip (unfortunately, there were a few in total). This isn't to say that I disliked the city - on the contrary, it was actually one of my favorite cities. However, Zadar is known in part for two quirky and really cool things, both designed by the same architect: the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun.

The Sea Organ is a series of 35 pipes that extend 70 meters along the coast. As the waves move and the tides change, the pipes play different chords and tones, creating literally some of the most unique music of mother nature possible. Very cool.

Zadar's Greeting to the Sun: what we hoped to see.

The Greeting to the Sun is an enormous circle of various glass plates set into the sidewalk of the waterfront. Under each of the glass plates are "photo-voltage solar modules through which symbolic communication with nature is made, with the aim to communicate with light" (as the Sea Organ "communicates with nature" through sound). When the sun sets, the circle is lit up in different ways, creating what Zadar's tourism board calls the "most beautiful sunset in the world." As I'm sure it's difficult to imagine what this strange attraction is like, there are a couple photos on the left taken from Google.

The circle is its own little mini solar power plant (producing energy to spare), which I think is pretty unique and cool.

Sadly, we sat on the waterfront long after the sunset, waiting for Zadar's #1 attraction to work its magic. When we were finally about to give up, I head a tourist nearby ask a passing local what time the circle usually starts its light show. The local responded that it was currently broken, with no known date to repair it. So, sadly, the only views we got of the Greeting to the Sun were like this:

Greeting to the Sun: what we actually saw.

Definitely a disappointment. But Zadar still should not be missed - even if you can stop for a few hours to walk around, it's still highly worth it.



*Both countries belonged to the former Yugoslavia, but Slovenia was of the first countries to break off and gain independence, and they became more financially stable long before the other former states - and still is, as it is the only of the former states to be part of the European Union (until Croatia just joined this past July 1st) and the only country to officially use the euro.

Happy blizzard!

I haven't written in a while, so I thought I'd give a brief update for all of you back in New England awaiting three feet of snow.

 

Those are from last weekend - I believe they're almond trees, but the flowers are very similar to cherry tree blossoms. They're actually only the first flowers I've seen (it's not like they're everywhere), but I hope they're a sign that winter is almost over!

Switzerland

At the very beginning of November, we had a holiday here in Spain. Doesn't really matter which one, and quite frankly I don't even remember. A day for some saint or religious figure, surely. Anyway, the holiday fell on a Thursday, which meant that my school also got Friday off. I took advantage of the four-day weekend and took a little trip to Switzerland. I flew to Basel, in the northwest corner of the country right where it borders France and Germany, and stayed there for three nights. Since Basel is pretty small, though, I spent the first day there, the second day in Freiburg (Germany), and the third day in Zurich.

View of Lake Zurich and Swiss Alps from the Üetliberg Mountain.

Basel and Freiburg were both nice little towns, but I really, really loved Zurich. This is partly because I had great weather in Zurich (the only day it didn't rain on me - it was actually sunny pretty much all day). The city definitely wouldn't have been as pretty and I wouldn't have gotten great views of Lake Zurich and the surrounding mountains if the weather had been rainy, or even cloudy. The only downside to Zurich - or anywhere in Switzerland really - is that it's expensive. They don't use the euro, and even though one Swiss franc is about equal to one euro, prices are crazy. I ate a sausage for lunch in both Basel and Zurich because the meals in sit-down restaurants seemed to run around 20 Swiss francs, minimum. (I didn't complain one bit though: even though I actually kind of despise Spanish sausage and don't care at all for Italian sausage, I cannot get enough of Swiss/German sausage. As someone once said to me, it's basically an art form there.)

Lunch in Basel.

Anyway, auf wiedersehen und gute nacht.